Abstract:

The Victorian period was a time of intense struggle over and change in the economic and sexual role of women in society, marked in particular by the rise of companionate marriage and a corresponding decline in the prevailing idea that marriage was to a high degree an economic contract. Although some historians have placed the rise of companionate marriage in England firmly in the eighteenth century or even earlier, I argue that, on the contrary, the shift to an ideal of marriages undertaken for love and characterized by equality of the partners was still very much ongoing and indeed controversial during the mid-Victorian period of which I write. The cultural ferment over the changing nature of marriage was in part played out in arguments that employed a surprising parallel between prostitutes and wives who had married for money. Social critic W.R. Greg, for instance, writing in 1850, bluntly stated that "for one [prostitute] who... sells herself to a lover, ten sell themselves to a husband," thereby comparing perhaps the most reviled and most hallowed institutions of the Victorian age. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the significance within nineteenth-century British culture of the analogy that Greg draws, and so to examine the crucial and controversial intersection of love and economics in the cultural construction of marriage among the Victorian middle class. Legal reforms and shifts in cultural attitudes changed the institutions of marriage and prostitution, and this dissertation examines both, with particular attention to manifestations of the culture of the large Victorian middle class. The Introduction discusses the legal status of marriage and prostitution up to the 1860s. In Chapters One, Two, and Three I provide readings of three canonical and well-known Victorian novels Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son and Little Dorrit that concentrate on each novel's development of a parallel between prostitution and marriage in order to construct a critique of the frequently mercenary nature of Victorian marriage. Chapter Four turns to the mainstream periodical press of the 1860s, in which there was a sudden explosion of articles dealing with the economic nature of marriage (which frequently exhorted young people not to marry for money) just at the time that legal reforms of both marriage and prostitution were issues of major public concern. Chapter Five looks at a little-known novel of 1866, Felicia Skene's Hidden Depths, and its reviews in literary journals. Skene criticizes the sexual double standard and offers a scathing portrait of contemporary society's different attitudes toward prostitutes and the equally culpable young men who, she thought, both created and patronized them, yet were considered eligible partners in mercenary marriages. Skene's novel presents a less integrated view of prostitution and marriage, and so to some degree represents a shift away from the cultural phenomenon this dissertation traces. After the 1860s, the analogy between marriage and prostitution became less common, largely, I conclude, because attitudes toward marriage had shifted, so that there was no longer any question that companionate marriage was both the ideal and the norm. Although the mercenary marriages that provoked the comparison between prostitutes and wives did not entirely disappear, they were no longer so prominent nor so threatening as to demand the strong censure of a comparison with prostitution.